The actor earns an Emmy nomination for her heartbreaking performance as the queen's sister in The Crown.
Across the six seasons of Peter Morgan’s lauded drama series The Crown, one character in the royal lineup has served as an emotional touchpoint for audiences — Princess Margaret. In Seasons 1 and 2, actor Vanessa Kirby introduced the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth as both the life of the party and the Windsor with the most deeply feeling heart. Helena Bonham Carter continued Margaret’s storytelling in Seasons 3 and 4 as her marriage deteriorated and she searched for purpose within the confines of her royal duties. Seeing her through to the end, actor Lesley Manville takes up the mantle of Margaret, as she portrays the ailing princess across the last years of her life in the final two seasons.
The Oscar and BAFTA-nominated actor (Phantom Thread, Another Year) delivers a remarkable performance in the sixth season of The Crown, as Margaret suffers a series of strokes and the queen must say goodbye to her sister. In one of the season’s most memorable episodes, “Ritz,” now Emmy-nominated for its writing, cinematography, and makeup, Elizabeth and Margaret’s story comes full circle in a moving conclusion made all the more emotional by Manville’s poetic performance. The actor, who earned an Emmy nomination for her work, details what went into her portrayal and the legacy the series has crafted.
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville)
Queue: How did it feel coming back to the sets, coming back to the character, for this sixth and final season of The Crown?
Lesley Manville: There was an ease to coming back to it because you know what you’re doing with the character, you know how to play them, and there’s an anticipation about what Peter Morgan is going to give you to do this time.
How did it feel filming your final episode for The Crown?
LM: I didn’t know when we started the job a few years ago that he would make her primary episode in the final season about her demise and her dealing with her illnesses and her loneliness and her relationship with her sister. I didn’t know any of that, but I was really, really pleased when I read what he’d given me to do because it’s beautifully written and it’s a really potent story about two sisters. Not necessarily a queen and a princess, but two sisters who love each other very much who’ve had a classic sister relationship and who understand each other intrinsically.
Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville)
How did you prepare to play someone who was mentally and physically, in part, incapacitated?
LM: Playing her in that episode was quite a challenge. There’s no doubt about it. She has a series of strokes, so there’s a kind of dramatic arc that she has to adhere to. Every stroke isn’t the same. They’re progressive. So, I knew I’d have to work with people who were experts, and I did. I worked with speech therapists, people who work with stroke victims all the time, getting them back on their feet, and I met stroke victims, and I suppose that was the most significant part of the research. I met a variety of stroke victims which was useful because Margaret starts with quite a mild stroke. So, I met somebody who’d just had a mild stroke and you could sort of not notice they’d had it, really. Then I met somebody who was really very touching because he’d had a fairly bad stroke and it was really fascinating talking to him because he said, “I have all the language in my head. I have all the words. I can see the words,” but he just couldn’t get them out, and he kept apologizing. It was unbelievably moving, but you could see how this brilliant man was totally flawed by this thing that had happened to him, and he was quite young, actually, compared to Margaret. You always love a challenge as an actor. You love it. It’s what you relish, but I did read the episode and think, Right, okay. There’s a lot of work here. Of course, you’ve got all the teams that are working with you. Particularly with that episode, the makeup department was very, very significant in how we were going to chart this slow decline. It was thrilling, and once I got over the enormity of what I needed to try to achieve, what I wanted to achieve in it, I did the work. All the emotional stuff, how she felt about being ill, it’s documented, but that’s when your take on it as an actor and your choices come into play.
The series is finished. Margaret’s story is over. I wonder if you’ve had a chance to take stock, look back, and assess what you thought of being on The Crown.
LM: It’s been two years of my life. I’ve never had a character in my life for that long. Probably the maximum was five months of doing a play. So, it’s been a very, very long time. I feel like I know her very well, but I don’t feel in isolation in that knowledge of her because I feel absolutely that Vanessa knew her, Helena knew her, and now at this stage of her life, I know her, and I think the three of us have created this complex and rather magnificent woman. Everyone is complex. Everyone has multiple layers. There’s something about Margaret’s layers that I feel were slightly more in primary colors. She hated, she loved, she got drunk, she didn’t drink. Everything was on a large scale with her. There was a magnificence to her. So, it’s been pretty damn good to play her, really.
Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville)
What do you think the show’s legacy and its influence on other shows will be?
LM: It feels to me like it was the first show that was done on this scale. I hope its legacy will be that it took a globally famous family, speculated on what might make them tick, what might be behind the facade that everyone knows, so that you can see them as human beings, and there’s loads of conversation surrounding that: “Is it a drama? Is it real life? Should we do this? Should we do that?” It’s a drama, and I think it’s extraordinary to make a drama out of people who we don’t, by nature, fully understand because we’re not in their inner circle. If you’re in the Royal Family’s inner circle, I’m sure it’s great. You know exactly what they’re like sitting on the sofa watching the telly, having a cigarette and a gin and tonic and having dinner and, Goodnight. I’m off to bed. Fine, but 99.99% of the world doesn’t know the royal family in that way, so what can you do about that? You can make endless documentaries, but that doesn’t tell you. So, this series has speculated on what that inner world might be, and what I love about it is that, surprise surprise, they’re just like the rest of us, in so many ways. Emotional ways. Beating heart kind of ways.
